The Violent Femmes Perk Up
Think about Milwaukee’s Violent Femmes, and chances are you’re thinking about junior high school. That seems to be the time and place when the Femmes made their mark on an audience attuned to the their awkward rhythms and vocalist Gordon Gano’s nasal confusionfest. “Gone Daddy Gone,” “Add It Up,” “Blister…
Letters
Join the Moderates The dilemma of ethnic and racial diversity is a valid discussion for any news media organization [News, “Seeds of Trouble, Part II,” by Tim Fleck, September 15]. We must become a more multiculturally inclusive nation, and further efforts to accomplish this most mandatory task are to be…
Young Mods from the Garage
There are as many stylistic branches on the rock and roll tree as there are kids with guitars, and only a pessimist would regard that as a bad thing. But with so many of those kids crawling out to the end of their respective limbs, there’s no little comfort to…
Rotation
Maria Muldaur Meet Me at Midnite Black Top Records Muldaur made her first lasting mark on the pop world in 1974 with the “Midnight at the Oasis” single, and it wasn’t until 1992’s Louisiana Love Call CD that she began to climb out of the semi-obscure cult status that her…
PSAs for the People
Public Service Announcement No. 2,839… Just in case last week’s ACREQ ensemble tribute to the music of Frank Zappa at the Wortham Center didn’t provide enough posthumous feed for your Zappa jones, commercial concern Houston Record Connection presents the Houston Record Convention, described as “a semiannual show and sale for…
Abstraction Without Shame
Since the early 1980s, we’ve been told time and again of the emergence of a “new painting” — this despite the numerous and quite specific critiques painting has faced in recent decades. After a generation of savagely anti-idealist critics has worked to discredit the extravagant claims made for abstract painting…
The Scout Strikes Out
There isn’t much baseball in The Scout, but there hasn’t been much baseball in baseball the past few years either. And we know how that ended up: a bunch of dim bulbs ruined the fun for everyone by taking a frivolous enterprise far too seriously. The same is true of…
The Fun of Falling
Because the early reviews of Terminal Velocity weren’t particularly kind, and because I’m of the a-little-Charlie-Sheen-goes-a-long-way school of criticism, I entered my local multiplex recently intending to watch Sheen’s newest with one eye closed, and the other opened just wide enough to register Nastassja Kinski. I hadn’t seen her in…
Song of India
As the producing half of the famed Ivory/ Merchant moviemaking team, Ismail Merchant is responsible for creating the luminous look of such films as A Room with a View and Howard’s End, doing so on a budget that typical Hollywood flicks might set aside for catering. He convinces actors the…
The Sound of Muzak
With the release of the Houston-filmed Jason’s Lyric, the wave of black movies that began with She’s Gotta Have It has well and truly ended. The tide has actually been returning to the sea for some time now, and this amusingly inept film is like that mysterious surf foam you…
The Terminator of TSU
For her inaugural gala as the eighth president of Texas Southern University last December, Joann Horton transformed the school’s gymnasium into an elegant ballroom with draperies, potted plants, linen covered tables and a portable dance floor. While a jazz combo played in the background, bartenders poured champagne and liquor at…
Log Cabin Fever
Slightly built, soft-spoken attorney Steve Mansfield, a Republican candidate for a seat on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, doesn’t look like a guy prone to commit heroic acts of conscience. And standing before a recent assemblage of the Log Cabin Republicans, an organization of gay Republicans, Mansfield didn’t. Instead,…
Art of the Mortgage
If you’re wondering why Houston Museum of Fine Arts director Peter Marzio hasn’t shipped out to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (or other class-act art barns reported to be eyeing his talents), you probably don’t realize how sweet Pete’s deal with the MFA really is. For starters, the 50-year-old…
Psychotic Reaction
Larry Newton knows firsthand that psychiatric crisis care in Harris County is a tragic mess. With a 12-year history of manic depression, the 35-year-old Newton routinely depends on the public health care system for emergency mental health care, often with miserable results. Late last year, Newton was in a manic…
Press Picks
thursday october 6 Best of Texas Wine Awards and Tasting Before prohibition, Texas was a grape-growing state. Prohibition knocking out our vineyards is a trifle odd, given that they were first planted by Spanish missionaries. (The good padres needed sacramental wine. Anyone who’s spent a moment on the parching Gulf…
Neo China … or Not
What’s so neo about Neo China? Well, the neon in the window, the black-lacquered neo-deco chairs and the Art Institute-style gallery of moderno paintings are a far cry from the restaurant’s original incarnation as Swan Den, the venerable Rice Village family spot. Swan Den delivered middle-of-the-road Chinese fare to a…
Bread and Balm at Bistro Cuisine
Life at the hub of the Galleria area seems kinder now that caterer Marian Tindall has opened her French-inspired lunchroom, Bistro Cuisine. A perfect croque monsieur; triumphant Caesar salad; a proprietress who concocts her own mayonnaise, bakes her own breads, roasts her own beef and exhibits a healthy respect for…
Live Shots
ACREQ Cullen Theater, Wortham Center Saturday, September 24 This performance was entitled “The Dangerous Kitchen: The Music of Frank Zappa,” and it filled that bill admirably, featuring 21 selections spanning 25 years of the iconoclastic composer’s work. Before an audience split between buttoned-down Society for the Performing Arts subscribers and…